[183] Murray himself had the same false notion concerning six of these adjectives, and perhaps all the rest; for his indefinite andsoforths may embrace just what the reader pleases to imagine.  Let the following paragraph be compared with the observations and proofs which I shall offer:  “Adjectives that have in themselves a superlative signification, do not properly admit of the superlative or [the] comparative form superadded:  such as, ‘Chief, extreme, perfect, right, universal, supreme,’ &c.; which are sometimes improperly written, ’Chiefest, extremest, perfectest, rightest, most universal, most supreme,’ &c.  The following expressions are therefore improper.  ’He sometimes claims admission to the chiefest offices;’ ‘The quarrel became so universal and national;’ ’A method of attaining the rightest and greatest happiness.’  The phrases, so perfect, so right, so extreme, so universal, &c., are incorrect; because they imply that one thing is less perfect, less extreme, &c. than another, which is not possible.”—­Murray’s Gram., 8vo, Vol. i, p. 167.  For himself, a man may do as he pleases about comparing these adjectives; but whoever corrects others, on such principles as the foregoing, will have work enough on his hands.  But the writer who seems to exceed all others, in error on this point, is Joseph W. Wright.  In his “Philosophical Grammar,” p. 51st, this author gives a list of seventy-two adjectives, which, he says, “admit of no variation of state;” i. e., are not compared.  Among them are round, flat, wet, dry, clear, pure, odd, free, plain, fair, chaste, blind, and more than forty others, which are compared about as often as any words in the language.  Dr. Blair is hypercritically censured by him, for saying “most excellent,” “more false,” “the chastest kind,” “more perfect” “fuller, more full, fullest, most full, truest and most true;” Murray, for using “quite wrong;” and Cobbett, for the phrase, “perfect correctness.”  “Correctness,” says the critic, “does not admit of degrees of perfection.”—­Ib., pp. 143 and 151.  But what does such a thinker know about correctness?  If this excellent quality cannot be perfect, surely nothing can.  The words which Dr. Bullions thinks it “improper to compare,” because he judges them to have “an absolute or superlative signification,” are “true, perfect, universal, chief, extreme, supreme, &c.”—­no body knows how many.  See Principles of E. Gram., p. 19 and p. 115.

[184] The regular comparison of this word, (like, liker, likest,) seems to be obsolete, or nearly so.  It is seldom met with, except in old books:  yet we say, more like, or most like, less like, or least like.  “To say the flock with whom he is, is likest to Christ.”—­Barclay’s Works, Vol. i, p. 180.  “Of Godlike pow’r? for likest Gods they seem’d.”—­Milton, P. L. B. vi, l. 301.